Bowden Fish Hatchery
$10M-plus project to expand facilities
Photo courtesy of West Virginia DNR The state DNR has begun stocking tiger trout into lakes and streams around the state for the first time in decades. The Bowden Fish Hatchery will be producing and stocking the fish.
The Inter-Mountain photo by Edgar Kelley Work on expansion at the Bowden Fish Hatchery will continue through the summer and is projected to be finished by the end of November of this year. An additional 20 raceways have already been completed at the facility.
Photo courtesy of West Virginia DNR The state DNR has begun stocking tiger trout into lakes and streams around the state for the first time in decades. The Bowden Fish Hatchery will be producing and stocking the fish.
The Inter-Mountain photo by Edgar Kelley Work on expansion at the Bowden Fish Hatchery will continue through the summer and is projected to be finished by the end of November of this year. An additional 20 raceways have already been completed at the facility.
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BOWDEN -- Officials are hoping that, if all goes well, the extensive expansion project at the Bowden National Fish Hatchery will be completed sometime in November.
The project, which broke ground in 2020, had been in the planning stages for quite some time, and is expected to come in at a total cost of between $10-12 million.
"We got the initial design back in 2009, so it's been going on for a long time," Jim Hedrick, Hatchery Program Manager for the state Department of Natural Resources, told The Inter-Mountain. "But we had to get the design complete and secure that large amount of funding before we could pull the project off."
The hatchery currently produces nearly 200,000 pounds of trout annually, and currently has 40 raceways or troughs up and running. The project will add an additional 20 raceways to the facility, which is projected to then produce another 100,000 pounds of trout annually.
"Everything with the project is coming along real well," Hedrick said. "We have all the new raceways already in place and what we are working on now is basically the equipment that works inside the hatchery building that will recirculate the water. We are hoping to put some water and fish in some of those new raceways no later than November of this year."
Hedrick said that once the project is complete and everything has been deemed safe for the public, visitors will be able to return to the hatchery, which was built in the early 1960s.
"A lot of people miss going out to the Bowden Hatchery; unfortunately, we don't always have folks on staff that can talk to them because their focus has to be the production of the fish and they stay pretty busy," Hedrick noted. "A lot of people like going to look at the fish. I wish we had more people out there that could communicate with them and answer their questions. Maybe in the future that will come down the road."
The Bowden facility isn't the only hatchery in the state to receive upgrades, as improvements to other hatcheries across West Virginia are planned, Mark Scott, assistant chief of Fish Management for the DNR, said.
"We have plans to upgrade all of our trout hatcheries in the state," Scott said. "It may take five or six years to do them all, but once we're done it will bring all of them up to snuff. And it should increase our capacity to raise as much as 50 percent more trout per year."
Last week Gov. Jim Justice announced that the DNR would begin stocking tiger trout into lakes and streams around the state for the first time in decades. Hedrick said the Bowden Fish Hatchery would be producing as well as stocking the fish.
"We are stocking the tiger trout statewide so the Bowden Hatchery does have them on hand right now and we're mixing them in with basically every stocking, they are going out every day," Scott said. "We are hoping to keep them for next year. We do have some small ones to hatch so we do have some fingerlings to stock next year as well. Right now we are getting them from the state of Virginia, who has been nice enough to provide us eggs.
"We do have one of our hatcheries making a few of them, but they're kind of a tricky fish to produce in order to get to survive correctly, so we are hoping to keep this relationship with Virginia to be able to provide us with some eggs in the future."